CONTINUING at the IFC, in Dublin this week is Safe, Todd Haynes's eerie, intriguing and unsettling picture of a young woman (played by Julianne Moore) who suffers from a debilitating disease brought on by an extreme allergic reaction to toxic substances. The film had its first Irish screening at the Dublin Film Festival in the spring and Todd Haynes came to Dublin to discuss the movie with the festival audience.
"I first heard about environmental illness on one of those silly" American news magazines on television," he said when we talked on the day after the festival closed. "They were calling it 20th century disease, which was interesting, and they were describing it gas something to do almost exclusively with women, which made it, more interesting."
Researching the subject, Haynes went to New Age health centres - none as extreme as the one in his, film, he says - and interviewed people with the illness. "It wasn't until then that I really took it seriously and started to believe it," he says. "I think there are some questions which it raises, but it's almost arrogant when people dismiss it. Given that chemicals can destroy the planet so completely - the ozone layer, the rain, forests - they must have some effect on the human organism."
His ideas for the film were not motivated by what he calls "an environmental ticket". "It was more to do with larger questions about what getting sick does to you, to your identity, to the way you think of yourself and how you have to call yourself into question when you can't do, the things used to define yourself."
Is he drawing any parallels with AIDS? "To a degree," he says. "Some people say why be so coy, why not go and do a film about AIDS? AIDS brings with it such a specific set of issues and arguments that I really wasn't interested in exploring with this film. AIDS is so enormous and touches on so many issues in society, I don't think you can make a film about AIDS. Definitely the film's scenes of attempted spiritual solutions to illness, that came from AIDS. I was interested in putting it in the film because of the Eighties trend of New Age therapies for people with AIDS. I didn't understand what people were getting out of that shit and I wanted to try and understand it better."
Safe features a riveting central performance from Julianne Moore and Haynes seems almost ashamed to admit that she was his second choice for the role after Jennifer Jason Leigh turned it down. "Julianne wanted to do it so badly," he says. "It's a very selfless performance. She really serves the film in this amazing way and she herself is so unlike the character in every way. She did an amazing job and she believed in the script more than I could have hoped."
Todd Haynes was born in Southern California in 1961; his parents married young and were 20 when Todd was born. In 1985, after graduating from Brown University with a degree in art and semiotics, he moved to New York and got involved in film-making, making his first impact in 1987 with Superstar:
The Karen Carpenter Story.
"When I was growing up, it was music I associated more with my parents and then I started to like it," he explains. "I was nine when Close To You and We've Only Just Begun came out and to me, it was the last time I shared popular culture with my parents. After I moved from college to New York, and I was thinking about doing a film with dolls, I heard one of the Carpenters songs on the radio in a cafe, for the first time since I was a kid. It was a shocking recognition of another time in your life, when the time capsule explodes. You hear the lyrics in a new way, given what happened to Karen Carpenter and the way your own life has changed. It just felt like a rich territory to explore in a film and it seemed like just the perfect thing to do with dolls."
The film was never formally released and was distributed in a renegade manner, first because of problems with the manufacturers of Barbie dolls, even though only some of the dolls in Superstar were Barbies. "We offered them a disclaimer or a credit, and they rejected both," says Haynes. "I think they probably saw a much bigger problem was about to arise with the music and was just waiting to happen."
Happen it did in 1990 when Haynes received letters of cease and desist from Richard Carpenter's Karen's brother and performing partner. Haynes says his last-ditch effort was when Superstar was being shown in anorexia clinics, in hospitals and in colleges. Haynes wrote to Carpenter, enclosing supportive letters from doctors and asking if the film could be shown non-theatrically in just those venues, with all proceeds being donated to the Karen Carpenter Memorial Foundation for anorexia research. Carpenter said no.
It is a sad irony that Karen Carpenter's legacy is being controlled so strictly after her death because, as Haynes says, "controlling, close, intense families are quite often the ones which produce anorexics - because for these women, and sometimes men, the only control they can exert themselves is over their bodies, their diets, and that's what they turn to.
Todd Haynes followed Superstar with his first full-length feature, the Genet-inspired Poison, which interweaves three apparently unconnected stories' and won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Whereas some compared it to Fassbinder films, Haynes himself believes that Vincente Minnelli and Walt Disney were stronger influences on his approach to the film.
In between making Poison and Safe, Todd Haynes directed the half-hour short, Dottie Gets Spanked, which he describes as the most autobiographical film he has made. "As a boy I was obsessed with Lucille Ball and I got to see her show being filmed and, to give her a book," he says. "I was seven. When I met her she was this scary general, this terror who was dominating every aspect of the production. Yet she chose, to portray to the world this polar opposite persona, this whiny, vulnerable, child-like character - a baby-woman really."
Todd Haynes will delve into his more recent past for his next movie, an as-yet-untitled picture set in the heyday of glitter rock in the early Seventies. "It will be a fictionalisation of a few characters based loosely on real people," he, says. "What it needs to be is a film as stylised and camp and humorous as glitter rock was. Some of, my favourite music comes from that time - the music was so postured and so smart and so referential, but it was incredibly emotional and beautiful and powerful. And that Seventies climate seems so different culturally and politically to today's."
A sad footnote to Todd Haynes's visit to Dublin came later that night as he was looking for a taxi on South Great George's Street and he was attacked. "I got slugged in the face with a brass knuckle," he said after he returned to Brooklyn. "I didn't even see the guys coming. I only heard them laugh after they'd hit me. They broke my nose in two places. I got two black eyes, and cuts on my nose. I was lucky, though. I can breathe normally. Even that night, I could breathe through both nostrils. I've never been queer-bashed before. It was the first time. That was my adventure in Dublin.
